


Verboten

by MilkshakeKate



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Attempted Seduction, Established Relationship, F/M, Fire Safety Thrown to the Wind, Illya Nuts for Censorship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 14:26:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8165137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilkshakeKate/pseuds/MilkshakeKate
Summary: Gaby gifts Illya an inspiring little book she once read in East Berlin.





	

Gaby peers up at him under her lashes, cheek tilted into her palm, elbow braced on the coffee table. She knows he is pretending to read, can see it in the conscious sweep of his pupils from left to right, too smooth a pace for reading German. 

“Interesting?” she prompts, and picks up her glass.   

Illya hums at her. “This book is prohibited.” He lifts it with his thumb buried deep in the crux of the pages. “You read this as a girl?”   

“When I was nineteen.”   

He eyes her. “This copy?”   

“No. The one I read belonged to my friend Angelika.” She watches him too, and decides she enjoys his conflicted curiosity, the prospect of Illya delving into forbidden literature. “Her flat was right next to the wall. Her Wessi cousin tucked books into old copies of _Neues Deutschland_ , threw them into the yard, and Angelika passed them around. For a fee.”   

He hums again, caught between disapproval and admiration. “Not so angelic.”   

Gaby rolls her eyes. Another sip of her gin sets a hot spread down her throat. She takes a moment to look over him, and at the stretch of his black sweater over his chest, still rising and falling steadily despite her efforts so far.    

“And where did you find this copy?”    

“I had Solo lift it for me.”    

He nods, unsurprised. “Of course.”    

The fire sinks heat into her back. It crackles and breathes, flickering deep orange and giving Illya a little colour where weeks of Austrian snow has paled him. Or perhaps he has only landed on the most forbidden chapter of all. When he returns to reading in earnest, rather than only to ignore her gaze, he shifts in his seat as if he has.   

Work has been encompassing, a priority at the expense of their intimacy. Illya, in all his professionalism during a string of particularly messy missions, has refrained from having her. KGB enforces abstinence in such circumstances, he’d said: _sex is distraction, makes strong limbs loose and the sharpest minds wander_.   

Gaby told him what she thinks of the KGB.  

She does not suffer from this ailment. She has often happily indulged in Illya all morning, rolled around in his sheets all afternoon, and closed a case of her own before supper. Gaby compartmentalises, where Illya’s work and his impulses are constantly at war.   

It isn’t his fault.  

 _Perhaps it will clear your head_ , she’d tried, wearing very little and tracing up the length of his arm. _Stress relief. Extracurricular activity_.  

It has been five weeks of the same: 

Illya will kiss her, but he will hold her wrists. 

He will take to the zip of her dress to help her into it, and out of it, but promptly disappear to his own room thereafter. 

He will stroke her cheek and bring her coffee, bicker with her, compliment her, let her adjust his tie and offer to take her coat, but he won’t fall into her bed for half an hour. He won’t fall into bed at all. She’s convinced he has booked separate hotel rooms at his own expense to escape her.   

During a ludicrous and unrecognisable lapse of judgement: _what’s the matter with me?_ And, moments later, after sending a heated glare in his direction for ever having made her think such a thing: _No, what’s the matter with you, Illya?_

That same afternoon she accused him of losing interest in her, and he had looked at her like she’d laid into him with a knife. He kissed her passionately, finally, a leg-weakening and heart-pounding kiss she hadn’t tasted for a month, before setting her promptly down to return to his transcripts.  

Now, Illya reads on. She watches him closely, and especially his seat on the settee in front of her. She has a fine view from down on the flokati rug, pyjama-clad legs curled beneath the coffee table and leaning over it toward him, comfortable, patient, invested. In all her dastardly machinations, she is still warmed when she gets to see him like this. She could watch him flare his nostrils and furrow his brow all night, burying his comprehension in maturity, pragmatism.   

“Read me the line you’re on.”   

He takes her in, surveying her stance on the floor. How much of her face can he see with the fire burning bright behind her? Perhaps only her silhouette, the loose fall of her hair over her shoulders.    

“No.”   

Gaby smiles at him. “It’s a rude part.”   

“I am concentrating.”    

She peers over the curved lip of her glass, sipping the cool wet lining the bottom. She swirls it a little, needlessly, only to have him watch the tilt of her wrist. “I’ll bet.”   

Before giving the book to him, Gaby made sure to crack the spine so that her decided chapter might fall into his palms naturally. One glance at a provocative adjective, oh, around seventy two pages in, and he would not be able to look away. Maybe in his shock he would work himself up to that spontaneous heat she has missed; to have Illya blush and stagger, a stab of arousal in all the monotony of schedules, carefully laid plans, entirely unnecessary celibacy. But he had looked away, almost knowingly, and flicked back to the beginning. Illya does not skip ahead without context. He never has. It had only been a perverse hope to see him give in to impulse, now that they are finally sharing a suite alone together – much to his dread – that had convinced her to try.   

He makes a show of turning the page.    

“Am I embarrassing you?”   

“This is hardly worst material I have seen.”   

She makes an impressed little noise, and he closes his eyes. “You condemn Angelika,” she says thoughtfully, “but your comrades had their own book club.”   

Illya says nothing.    

“Read me one line. Any.”   

He presses his lips together firmly, but he does clear his throat. She only smiles at him, saccharine, shifting to cross her ankles in front of her and plant her palms in the high pile of the rug.   

“ _The dinner was a tableau of final tastes, riches,_ ” he begins, begrudging, but not as if such prose is beneath him. After all he has made it this far, and that encourages her. “ _It would be ours. I knew then that I would be sat beside him, and_ —” Illya pauses, pretending to struggle in order to skim ahead a few lines.    

“Go on!”    

He holds his index finger up.   

Something very warm sinks in Gaby’s stomach, because she knows what comes next. Down to the last letter, she knows. Excitement reels, opening her ears and warming her cheeks. “Go on, Illya.”   

Illya measures her intently for a long while, and she feels it like a brush of skin, like a broad palm on her waist, which incidentally is where his gaze decides to rest. He has the line of her silhouette then, she decides, and leans back to stretch into it for him.   

He claps the cover closed. “This is very lewd book,” he manages, eventually.   

“You don’t have to read it.”   

“No.”   

“— _And that it would only be three hours before all the guests, all those strangers, would return home, and at last we would be alone._ ” Gaby goes on from memory, wishes she could hear him form the rest, low and grave, his German tinged with the accent of those who’d confiscated such trashy pleasures from her years ago. Wishes to have him utter rude words and articulated sensations; things he would never say aloud, but which she knows he is more than capable of delivering, and which in all this time apart haven’t dulled in her mind.    

She could recite more, but she won’t. Not yet.   

Illya puts the book on the table neatly. “You have read this many times.”   

“Only that chapter.”   

The fire isn’t alone in colouring Illya’s cheeks. In moments, the tips of his ears are deep pink too, and his shoulders forcibly settled.    

Gaby tops up her gin and picks up the book for herself. She thumbs through the pages with nostalgia.   

“Don’t,” Illya says quietly.   

She raises a brow at the book, at him. “You have read far worse, of course.”   

Again, he says nothing.   

She folds the top corner of the page to mark it. “ _To have his fingers on my breasts and his mouth on my neck, murmuring into me like a prayer, too late for dinner—_ ” she snorts then, having once found it all so very severe, dramatic, and now so dated and contrived. She intones theatrically, “ _—before he parts for Ellis Island! And I am left to think only of him, of him as an island! And to starve alone at this table where together we once ate._ ”   

Illya’s palms are flat on both his thighs. Gaby sips her drink with a smirk and holds the book aloft, twisting to lie down alongside the cool marble hearth. The rug tickles the nape of her neck. She balances the glass on the flat of her stomach and flicks a few pages further in, where a particularly lusty dream is described in detail ripe for censorship. A late 1920s German translation from the original French, it is clumsy but serviceable enough.    

“Here it is,” she tells Illya, rolling her head on her hair to look up at him. “This part made Angelika a lot of money.”   

“Hm.”   

Gaby clears her throat. “ _When the fever peaked, he came to me in a dream—_ ”   

“This is farther than I have read,” Illya tries.   

“Emmaline is ill – heartbreak, obviously. She is staying in her aunt’s suite in Marseille. Shall I not spoil it for you?”   

He could get up to leave, but he won’t.    

She puts her glass on the hearth and offers the paperback to him, just out of reach. “Or perhaps you would like to have a go?”   

Illya considers this. He peers down at the rug, at the fire, and at Gaby sprawled warm and lax between them. He will have to lean in to take it from her, and knows what comes next as well as she does. He looks young and hard done by, Gaby thinks, having something he covets dangling beyond his grasp. His time with she and Napoleon has ruined his resolve. Now he knows small luxuries. An abundance of fashion labels, strange little cakes, gilt frames and goose down beds. Months ago, he would have flung the book into the fire. Only now he is curious, _certainly_ corrupted, and he is most fond of Gaby, another indulgence he still believes he oughtn't take too much of.  

After great calculation, Illya edges forward.   

True to form, Gaby pulls the book flat to her chest. And because he knows this game and believes he can beat it, Illya follows, coming to his knees by the coffee table. He doesn’t take it from her. He only lays his hands on his thighs and waits for her to escape him again. Move by move, he is ever the strategist.    

She turns onto her side, lays the book open between her body and the hearth. The fire is hot and dry on her cheek, and the little gin she has had rushes to bloom under it. She feels the flood of this girlish blush and wills it down, mortified that it feels like their first time alone together. After all her work for UNCLE, and after all her time with Illya, she surely ought to have lost her anxiety before the final hurdle. Surely! She has hardly become virginal over the course of a month — what of the years before Illya? How had she managed then? 

But the nerves are a part of her, as much as the blush itself. That anticipatory thrill before he touches her, the static electricity that diffuses to a warm glow as soon as he’s where she needs him to be... 

Perhaps he has a point, then. If he feels the same darting adrenaline while untouched for so long, and if it numbs when she is on him, around him, under him… _would_ it numb him to his work? Dull all his senses after having them struck brilliantly alight, only to become as useless to him as a blackened matchstick?   

Is he right?  

She hopes not.  

Illya’s weight stretches out behind her, and she smiles for his resigned little sigh as he tries to gets comfortable, leaning up on an elbow, always too big. He reaches over her and pushes an index finger into the spine to keep the pages from fanning together, continues to read.   

He doesn’t read aloud. Gaby follows along at a pace she feels he keeps himself, concentrating mostly on the return of him to her; the loom of his chest along her shoulder blades, the bend of his knees against the soles of her feet.    

Illya’s arm settles on her waist with a whole weight she could sink under. His thigh presses closer behind her, pushing her knees up to curl until she’s settled almost wholly in his lap.    

“Where are you up to?” she murmurs, barely sensible.   

Illya’s finger draws to a paragraph lower down the page than she’d suspected, surprising her in his fluency despite the archaic syntax, the poor translation. At this pace, he should have finished the book long before now. But of course, context. His fingertip lands on the word ‘ _my_ ’, and sweeps under the rest of the line smoothly, deliberately unaffected — _thighs, and pushed bruises where I might feel them for weeks, though when I woke they would be gone, and his mouth, too, never having laid itself where I had dreamt of him to be_.   

Gaby wriggles then, and his finger stops tracing.    

“Interesting?” Illya prompts low in her ear, smug.   

She pushes back, flush against him. He doesn’t pull away. “Apparently.”   

“I think I would prefer brief summary,” he decides, somewhat grimly. He lets the pages shuffle closed and settles his palm on her waist. He turns her to lie on her back, to look up at him instead. Peering down, his gaze is soft and curious. “Does Marc return?”   

“Oh, probably.”   

“Tell me you read this book for the plot, the politics.”   

She thumbs over his lower lip. “For the feasts and the sex.”   

His eyes narrow with a glare of a smile. Another misbehaviour. He doesn’t hold her to his politics. She knows that her otherness is an attraction to him, a mile away from everything he feels he ought to value and desire. How she challenges him, defies him. He has never known it anywhere else. When she traces his scar with the tip of her ring finger his eyes close gently, gold lashes and softened brow, and she’s convinced that nobody else has ever seen Illya Kuryakin like she has.   

“I want to hear the rest,” he says then.   

“Oh,” Gaby says distantly. She nudges his thigh between hers, bravely dips her heel into his lower back to have him settle closer. “There is another dream. Quite a rude one.”   

“Really.” His eyes stop searching hers, and he ducks into the crook of her neck. Gaby sighs without thinking, smothered by the close new warmth. He kisses her pulse point once, very gently. “What does she dream of?”   

“I think that’s quite obvious.”   

“Brief summary will suffice.”   

“Well.” Gaby smooths over his hair, gathers her wits. “In this dream, Marc returns. He is rich, with a booming business in the land of the free.”   

His scoff shocks her. “Fiction.”   

“It’s a _dream_ ,” she scolds, tilting her chin to accommodate him. “Though it does come true later on.”   

Illya halts long enough for her to peer down at him. He’s betrayed. “She did not support his emigration. She valued home life and service to her native country. Emmaline was sensible in this respect alone.”   

Gaby smiles, pacifying, and pulls him back into her neck. “He arrives in her dream to tell her that he is sorry for leaving. She forgives him, obviously, and he pleases her.”   

“Hm.” His lips buzz over her skin, the soft patch under her ear. “A miracle. I presume this comes true in time, as well.”   

“Of course. There are over one hundred pages left.”   

Illya considers this for a while. "And after this?"   

"You _are_ interested."   

His kiss spreads open just above the collar of her nightshirt, warm but brief. Gaby closes her eyes so he won’t see them roll backwards. "He returns to her."

"To Paris,” she manages. “His empire only grows. They never marry, only throw parties and have rampant sex and eat like royalty — quite like Solo, actually —  for the rest of their lives."   

"You are teasing me."   

Gaby laughs at him. She covers his fingers, now working on slipping through the buttons of her nightshirt. "You're one to talk."   

Her stomach jumps, thrown off by the weight of him settling lower. Illya dedicates himself to working down the buttons, lightly kissing the tan skin revealed underneath. Gaby threads her fingers into his hair, kisses his crown in return. She has missed him like this, soft and exploring. She could lie down forever when he takes his time.    

“ _His tongue was a warm velvet,_ ” she recites solely to embarrass him, languishing under the spread of his lips on her collarbone, sucking gently where clothes will conceal tomorrow. “ _Pleasure to weaken me until I might never leave that bed!_ ”   

Illya finds a forgotten scar and groans, takes her waist in both hands. “Gaby.”   

“What?”   

His grip firms. “You read indecent literature.”   

“I did.” She frowns down at him fondly. “Why? Are you wearing a wire?”   

“Thinking of you,” he explains, mumbling, and finishes off the last button. He pushes the sleeves down her shoulders, presses his lips to her bared breasts. Pulling back with a small wet sound, her skin blooms red where his teeth have been. “Without me, thinking of this.”   

“Thinking of Marc.”   

Illya grumbles, taking to the satin bow at her waist. “You did not know me at nineteen.”   

Gaby shivers. He takes her thigh and pushes it up, tight, with a deep breath ghosting down the line of her stomach and over all the goosebumps rising there; prickling skin despite the roaring fire, a last reflexive guard where all her other defences have fallen.    

“I think of you,” she confesses. His knuckles graze over her hips, tugging the waistband down inch by inch. Gaby lifts up for him and he tucks a hand under the small of her back.    

“Of us? Like this?” he asks, tilting his head at the abandoned, inciting paperback, and the indecency he has barely had a taste of. 

She wonders if he will find the whole chapter tame after this, whimsical and base. If he will be able to concentrate on it without this crude seduction playing back in full colour. Will it be overwritten for him now? Like Gaby’s rush of affection on seeing grey caps alone in shop windows, unable to consider anything but _Illya, Illya_? He has marked her world already. The book is mild, now. Everything else but the two of them is mild. It's incomparable, like measuring the book’s tepid water to Illya’s molten touch, its slow humidity to his very real flesh searing against hers. How will he be shocked by suggestive vocabulary once he has fucked her with the recitation still warm on her tongue, fresh in his ears while he can still taste her, real body in his hands and skin under his teeth?

Gaby impulsively ruffles Illya’s hair and arches up, so glad that she has him, that he is here at last.   

“Yes,” she breathes, and it’s all the truth. “Of us like this, like them. For weeks, Illya. I wish I could think of anything else.”   

Illya nods for too long. He lifts her knees to tug the pyjamas off her feet and throw them aside. Gaby elbows her way out of the open shirt and flings that away too, pulls him back down by his neck and wraps around him, entirely bare and revelling in the harsh drag of him through his trousers, the gathering of his sweater under her fingertips. She’s at a disadvantage, clothes-wise, but it only excites her. His hands can’t find a place to settle, roving over her flushed skin with suddenly so much more to reacquaint himself with. 

Where next? She shimmies her hips and pushes down on his shoulders.   

“Impatient,” he murmurs into her chest. His palms sweeping down to part her legs suggest it’s finally a mutual weakness.   

“Whose fault is that?”    

Illya sucks a small bruise into the curve of her waist and loops under her thighs, lifts them to rest on his shoulders. Gaby’s stomach flips for the pleased little groan he lets out. He's close enough to feel the heat there, and he kisses her thigh with intent to mark.     

“Think of me,” he reminds her, and she looks down her body to find his eyes dark with humour. He holds her gaze and licks into her, lingering until he has to tug her back to him when she starts to writhe in his hands.   

“Illya,” she strains, swallows down a moan. “Illya, who else?”    

He pats her thigh and shifts up to his knees, lifting her hips high in both hands to press deeper, close and controlled. Gaby forgets how to use her body. She sinks into his hold and throws an arm over her eyes, where the dry fire and her long-held breath makes them water. Perfect and overwhelming. The current of his breath and his soft lips parting her, hot, smothering, partnered with that hold and his determination to keep her attention, to be better, unforgettable. Is this what it’s all for? To rewrite an old fantasy? Is it jealousy? Gaby bucks up and he grips like he won’t let go. Is he only intent on fulfilling it for her?   

Gaby hunts blindly for his thigh and squeezes, earns a moan for it, reverberating low.    

She sobs something senseless back and tightens her legs around him, brow furrowed in disbelief — nothing like the book, nothing like the dreams. Illya kisses her there and goes on, weighing the tension of her body as she curls in and shudders. When she dares to let out a moan, he encourages her with more of the same. The sounds _he_ makes, dark little groans and deep breaths, his heavy shift on the rug as he moves with her, as if he's enduring this rise of pulsing pressure and rolling heat as well. She can barely look at him in case his eyes are open, his lashes low and mouth shining, working her as he works everything else; with pride and with accuracy, with honed skill and his full attention. The best, the very best Russia has, hot breath between her thighs and trigger finger pressing with all the rest into the flesh of her hips.   

A powerful roll of nerves swells up and up and Gaby arches high to chase it.

"That's it. That's—! Stay there. Illya, _stay_ —" she holds her breath until it splits into a gasp and Illya’s fingerprints push reassuring pools into her skin, fighting for a better hold on her. She rides through it, a wave that he soothes with his mouth as it settles, washing through all her muscles.    

Pleasure sinks in like a warm, golden honey. She’s breathing too heavily for anything she says to come out as smoothly, too lost to demand how he does it. Something in her lungs flutters madly when he parts from her. “God, Illya,” she manages, and shifts her legs hanging over his shoulders. The movement isn’t hers, numb and uncoordinated. “Just — wait there. Please. Let me...”   

Illya curls a palm over her shin and squeezes, kisses the crease of her thigh. He nods, and his faint stubble scratches. She can’t find the heart to tell him off for it.  

When she’s able, Gaby takes a breath and pads at him to let her come down. He looks dazed as he lowers her, fond, a little bit lost.  

“It has been a while since I have seen you like this,” he says. 

Gaby huffs, breathless. “A while since I have felt like this.”  

Illya smiles at her.  

She pushes her toes deep into the rug and stretches with a pleasant groan, sprawling through the ache. Illya’s hand circling her ankle and teasing up her calf is almost too much. She catches him between her knees and tugs him down, her own arms outstretched to have him settle in between. He does, chest to chest, and she kisses him, wrinkles her nose for the unfamiliar taste of herself. When Illya gives in, he kisses like it’s the last he’ll ever have; taking her cheeks and holding, tilting, his mouth leaving hers only to come back for another all over again, until she thinks that she might never let him go.   

Trailing up the back of his sweater and all the muscles tensing there, she lets her nails dip into his skin. Illya moans quietly into her mouth and Gaby could eat him up for it. She can’t grip tight enough. She wants to cling to him, have him lift her up off the rug, wrap her up by her every millimetre and seal all the space between them with an intensity that frightens her. A compulsion, greedy and all-consuming. This is what withdrawal and a sudden abundance can do.

He rolls down between her thighs and Gaby is mindless. She kisses the round of his shoulder through his sweater and palms impatiently over the hard, banked heat of his cock. A desperate sound just falls out of him and she starts to work on his belt.  

“Never—” Gaby starts, squeezes her eyes shut with another grind of his hips over hers, trapping her hands between them.   

“Hm?”   

“Five weeks, Illya.” She retrieves one hand to cup the back of his head, has him look at her. “Never again. Never, a-are you listening to me? What a stupid idea that was.”   

Illya gives a gruff little laugh. He tugs her up to him, arm crossed under her back so tight she has to let out a shaky sigh into his chest. “Was not my choice to refrain for so long.”   

Suddenly she can only look at his mouth, only just remembers to frown at him. “Well it certainly wasn’t my idea… ”  

She loses her trail of thought. Illya's lips are quickly back on her breasts, the wet sweep of his tongue peaking her and sending a bolt down her body all over again. She stares heavenward and bites her lip, only half intent on putting the pieces together, fully willing to let it go if he'll do that again.    

“Maybe I wanted to see how long you would last,” Illya says, and smiles, pulling his belt free of all its loops.  

Gaby stops. She gathers herself just enough to card through his hair, make a tight fist in it and tug. He groans so hard he halts too, pupils blown, and he weighs down on her with intent. He has always liked that. In a distant, less vengeful corner of her heart, she has missed sparring with him. Mostly because she is now finally furious enough to win, should her legs regain any strength in the next half hour.  

“Is that the truth?”  

Illya stares down his nose at her, head pulled back in that grip he can easily escape. He’s smiling still, like he’s protected. “Yes. Tomorrow I will be slow, weak.” He shrugs. “Fortunately the work is low threat, mostly surveillance, which is why—”  

“I didn’t ask if you were right to deprive yourself of me. I asked if you only wanted to have me beg like an idiot.”   

He kisses her parted lips feather-light before she can hide them from him, gives her an amused little look. “Your insistence was only enjoyment I had in otherwise… insufferable situation.”   

Gaby glares at him. “I’m glad you had so much fun.”  

“You won,” he commends, most magnanimously. “I could not resist you. You, your dirty book. Mission is compromised and our record marked yet again for my negligence to obey same fraternisation protocol you continually disregard. Does this please you?”  

“Beyond words.” Gaby lets go of his hair and he makes a wonderful little noise. She reaches into his trousers to curl a fist around him and desire barbs through her, shocking and animal for the weight and heat of him in her hand. 

Illya thrusts into it, all parted lips and knitted brow, breath shivering over her. The sheen of sweat for his hard work is made golden by the fire in a way that makes it impossible to recall any of his wrongdoings. When his eyes are closed, a miracle in itself, she can look at him with all the softness she has for him, almost worryingly unconditional. So she does. She commits him to memory like this in case he dares to pull such a stunt again tomorrow. 

And if he does?

There are over one hundred pages left.

Gaby kisses him quick and hard to bring him back. “Now show me how long _you_ can last.”   

  

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A fic???? by MilkshakeKate?? with illya going down on gaby???? you know I like to shake things up lmao... I'm a parody of myself and i'm so sorry. This is one step removed from bearskin rug sex and I'm also sorry for that. Would I also write Gaby and Illya going to town on a bearskin rug in Russia for Some Needless Reason? yes. omg yes I would.  
> Open flames vs. flokati rugs is a horrible idea, but maybe Illya also nuts for fire hazards.  
> Another of my proclivities: Gaby scheming with Illya's best interests at heart, and planning every element of this ridiculous last-resort seduction with a mechanic's finesse. I love her.  
> I had the MOST fun cobbling together Marc and Emmaline's sparse saucy French romance of feasts and raunchy orgies. The GDR really did censor ~pornographic~ (or 'crude') novels, anything relating to stream of consciousness, internal monologues, homosexuality, free form, general sauciness, and anything demonising the East/glamourising the West from 1949 onwards; hence a German translation from the 1920s once being published, but verboten in 1957 when Gaby was 19. I just loved the idea that Gaby had a small circle of friends who shared underground music and literature, with a trust that was mutually beneficial. Similarly, Gaby's alarm when Waverly approaches her for the first time, though it's been years since she's fraternised with the young smugglers of East Berlin, and her relief for not having been caught for it soon fizzling away once she realises why he has truly sought her out!  
> Naturally: thanks for reading!! Hope you're all well and will forgive me for succumbing to indulgent garbage yet again xx


End file.
